| Chapter 2: | Chatrooms and Small Group Learning |
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I will return to this theme in Chapter 3 where I suggest that the interaction between these variables—self-confidence and public self-awareness—can lead low confidence students to speak significantly more in an online environment than in a classroom environment.
2.3 Important Learning Behaviors
Having looked at the unique features of chat environments, I now shift my focus to the learning behaviors that seem particularly relevant for the study of these environments. As I described in Chapter 1, there are a number of pedagogical decisions and design variables that influence learning. By studying the interaction of a small set of these variables, we can improve our understanding of the design of new educational technologies. In this section, I describe two learning behaviors that seem to be especially salient in chat conversations: conversational equity and the reasoned exploration of multiple perspectives.
2.3.1 The Importance of Conversational Equity
By now, it is generally accepted that small group learning can have pedagogical benefits that surpass those achieved through individual learning (Lou, Abrami, & d’Apollonia, 2001), but there is still debate about the appropriate conditions for ideal small group learning.